Thursday, October 30, 2014

I did not expect to meet my mother,
six years after her death, in a blog post. I thought I had cremated her, dealt
with the seething, strangled ball of anger, honor and confusion I tried to
unravel as she lay dying eight thousand three hundred and forty-seven miles
away. But there
she was. In my
Facebook feed, my
friends’ conversations, suddenly, everywhere
I looked. The more I read, the bigger thought bubbles my memories blew.
They got larger, threatening to pop all over me, spittle and all, demanding to
be noticed. My childhood had finally come, screaming, swinging in the swiveling
kitchen door, naked, begging to be diapered, powdered, clothed. It was time, I
decided - time to either kiss the wound and send it away happy or put that
disobedient, tear-streaked cheek in the corner, to mete out punishment or take
it upon myself in the name of womanhood.

I knew what she would have done. I
knew only too well.

Cooking was how my mother showed
affection - and the lack of it. Making dinner was her weapon of choice. She
wielded it extremely well. On days she and my dad fought, there would be no
dinner cooked, as if to force my dad to acknowledge that he needed her after
all. On the flip side, she made homemade wine, pickles, party food, pizza,
festive food. Growing up, I didn’t know a single person who intentionally
stayed away from a celebration at our home. I knew no one went home and didn’t
tell whoever he met that he had just gained five pounds and wouldn’t mind
gaining another five if this woman invited him over again for dinner. My
father’s friends were jealous, as were mine.

Except for this one thing.

“Don’t you ever, ever quit your job
after you have kids!” she often warned. “You lose your worth. All you’re ever
good for is cooking and cleaning.” She didn’t teach me to cook, intentionally,
I think, even though some of my fondest childhood memories are puttering around
in the kitchen with my toy pots and pans while she cooked. As they say in
shorthand parlance, my relationship with cooking was complicated, right from
the start.

So I was disconcerted, to say the
least, to be confronted with the same acerbic complaining that still echoes in
my ears thirty years later on the other side of the globe. Cooking is too hard,
it takes too much time and no one appreciates it anyway. There should be
something better I could be doing with my time, something not inside this
house. Why all this focus on the homemade dinner, this onus on the mother? This
restlessness, this unnamed self-pity, the seeming sadness classified as the
woman’s lot, propped by ditties claiming a woman’s work is never done draw me
into darkened corners of my psyche I never wished to visit again, places that I
wanted to leave dimly lit, cobwebby and dank.

“Mommy, can I help?” my daughter
asks me today. She wants to chop vegetables, admire them. She wants to learn to
make aioli. She wants to do dishes, revel in the feel and worth of a kitchen
apron cut just to her size. She wants to learn my imperfect art. And I have to
look at it anew – not through my mother’s eyes but my own.

I have to do what my father wasn’t
willing to do to my mother - shake her out of her dark reverie, her imagination
that didn’t allow her to see the truth. That cooking is work but it isn’t drudgery. That it is a tool, not a weapon. I
have to remind myself, gruffly, if I must, that I actually do likemy food, even if I
don’t necessarily like to make it every single day. There are days when I’m
tired, not interested, would rather be reading or soaking in the tub, wine
tasting with my friends, but when I’ve had my fill of the world and all its
delicacies, I would rather just eat something cooked in my own kitchen. It’s
not gourmet and it’s not always fantastic. Yes, it’s work. But like all work,
it is ultimately satisfying and God-glorifying, even when it falls far short of
perfection. I have to remember, especially when it gets hard, that our family
dinner is more than food – it is life lived together – a culmination of all our
individual labors: my husband’s work away from home, my planning and shopping,
the children’s cooperation in the store and assistance in carrying in the
groceries and, finally, my cooking, in which my daughter sometimes joins. This
is not romanticizing our family dinner. This is just looking at it from a point
of view that is not borrowed and stitched together from the rags of feminism.

If I didn’t have a little daughter,
I would remain heartless, I sometimes think. She reminds me, innocently, quite
efficiently even, of what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I am surprised but
ready with an answer when a friend asks me the same question.

“I wanted to be like my mother,” I
say wistfully. Never having known the working mom side of my mother who quit
her job when I was three, I loved the notion that I would be a stay at home mom
when I grew up.I don’t know when it
became a bad thing, when cooking for people who depended on you to nourish and
love them became an insult, when it diminished your worth. I don’t know when I
began believing my mother’s lies. “I wanted to be like my mother. Only happier
with my life,” I say to her. And realized, then, that I am.

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Friends
don’t let friends drive drunk. This
is the one that started it all, so we can let it go, I guess. Then came others:
Friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks. Friends
don’t let friends drink blush wines, or
chardonnay, for that matter. People who offer you drugs are not your friends. Friends
don’t let friends smoke or
use bad grammar.
Friends don’t let friends eat GMO foods or use Huggies. Friends don't feed friends gluten, friends don't let friends avoid gluten, friends don't let friends vaccinate or not vaccinate. Friends don't let friends miss daily Bible reading time, friends don't let friends allow their babies to ride face forward even though it's legal. Friends
don’t let friends let their babies cry it out or not, or spank or coddle, or breastfeed or not breastfeed. Friends
don’t let friends do anything with which they disagree. Apparently,
friends don’t let friends do much of anything at all unless they are completely
complicit. It must then follow that they’re not friends; they’re clones. But
even that is tenuous at best. So
what are they? Carbon copies? For someone who can barely live with the thoughts
inside her own head on some days, that is a scary, downright terrifying thought.
If my own internal monologue gets on my nerves, I certainly do not want carbon
copies of me proclaiming the same thing I’m stating, repeated back to me,
echoing down endless mirrors of sameness until Christ returns. I mean,
seriously? Blech! Me too, me too, me too, me too, me too, me too, me too, we
would nod and nod like Sylvia Plath’s disquieting muses until we finally fell
asleep on our identical sheets on identical beds and wake up perfectly
disheveled, with matching puffy eyes the next day because we both woke up to
the sound of duplicate sprinklers on indistinguishable lawns because, well, we never let the other think otherwise, “let” being the operative word in all of this. (See, you
were wrong there, reader. You thought it was “friend.” You wild goose chaser,
you.)

So maybe it’s me who doesn’t get it.
Then again, maybe it's you.

My friends don’t let me do anything; they also don’t not let me do anything. They have opinions, some strong ones at
that. And I have opinions, equally strong. And that is okay. (Even if they’re
wrong.) (Yes, I said it. Get over it.) Because a friend can handle that. Neither
one of us feels the need to curtail, edit, alter or otherwise revise our
opinions because they do not reflect the other’s image. We are not friends
because we agree on most things. In fact, often, we are friends in spite of the
fact that we disagree. Lest you think this is tolerance, mind you. I’m not a tolerant
person. I do not believe it to be a virtue. I reserve the right to judge, to discern, to weigh the
spirits. I’m pugnacious, increasingly so as I grow older and things begin to
matter more than they ever did when I was young and single.
And yet, I have friends. Real,
legal-right-to-one-phone-call friends even.

We must be doing something wrong. If friendships rest on
us handcuffing the other into submission to our point of view, my friends aren’t
my friends at all. Yikes. Perhaps I’ll bring that up the next time we’re eating
gluten and drinking wine and Starbucks as we read a book about cry it out sleep training. Then again, I wonder if they’ll let me?

When I say I love it, I don’t mean it’s
easy. When I say I love it, I don’t mean only when it’s practical. When I say I
love it, I don’t mean I love it every minute we’re settled around the dining
table poring over worksheets and manipulatives. When I say I love it, I don’t even
mean that I do it perfectly or that I never wish (or pay) for a break. When I
say I love it, I don’t mean I’m going to only write about how wonderful it is
and only post uplifting things. When I say I love it, I definitely don’t think
it is the only way to educate my
children, but let me be perfectly clear about this one thing: I do,
whole-heartedly believe that it is the best
way.

“But… but… but…”

I can already hear the slingshots
loading.

“Surely you’re not saying you’re their
best teacher? What training do you have?”

“Are they learning anything? How do you
know they’re learning?”

“Oh, what? You think we who send our
kids to public school aren’t Christian enough? Are you looking down on us?”

To which I say, Yes, I am, and, I’d like
to understand your idea of being qualified to teach. Yes, I can see and hear
and understand, I’d like to talk to you in person about this, and finally, yes.

We’re not part of the purity culture or
the patriarchy movement or the unschooling culture
or whatever other "culture" you think we might fit into. We just happen to be passionate about homeschooling. I’m not necessarily
raising my daughter to be a homemaker and my son to work outside the home,
although that might just be how things work out. And if they do, I would be overjoyed.
Because you cannot be whatever you want to be and you cannot have it all. I
teach life skills depending on their interests and abilities. Right now, my
daughter wants to learn to cook, change diapers, do math, read, play with
babies and is able to do so. Currently, my son wants to learn to fix things, listen to stories, watch television, do
dishes, play video games and do math.So
that’s what we do.

And also, for the last time, I do
indeed believe it is the best way to educate because if I didn’t, if I didn’t truly, whole
heartedly believe that, why in the world
would I give it my all? In a world where it’s considered so very important
that I do something “just for me,” why would I choose to let go of other
pursuits – professional and artistic – and spend so much of my energy, my time,
my emotions, my intellect and sheer will in picking a curriculum, hand-holding,
controlling my temper, teaching, making my children do things they do not want
to do, catechizing, explaining, exhorting, disciplining? Why indeed? Because I
take God’s call to disciple my children when at home and when in the way and
when we wake up and go to sleep very seriously. Why else? And I just don’t see
how I can do it if they’re gone all day long in a place with twenty or thirty other children and an authority figure who is NOT their parent. There are only so many hours in the day.

If you think this is a case of
semantics, let me assure you it’s not. Where children spend most of their time
matters. Who they spend most of their time with matters. The kind of education they get matters. It matters a lot. I’m tired of
saying we do it for practical reasons, which could change as soon as it doesn’t
work anymore or as soon as it gets difficult or as soon as we can afford a
Christian school. I’m sick of disclaimers. I’m really just tired of defending
my family against people who either don’t like homeschoolers or homeschooling
or feel judged by my conviction that homeschooling is the ideal way to educate children. I’m tired of offering an apology for my passion; I am tired of
hearing it being called an agenda.

If I have an agenda, it is this: to
raise my children in freedom, to train them in a job well done, serving in excellence, knowing God and understanding how to relate to
Him, His Creation, themselves and their neighbors in His image, which is what
education is, after all. So maybe I do have a homeschool agenda.(Hey, you know what? Anyone who wants to get anything done has an agenda.)

Yes, homeschooling is all it’s cracked up to be. Even on days when it sucks. Even when it’s hard. I’m not asking for permission to be in love with homeschooling any
more. I’m not going to apologize for promoting it. I’m going to be
unabashedly supportive of other parents who choose this option. I’m not going
to say that it doesn’t matter what you choose. Not any more. Because it does. I am a homeschooler. And I love it.